


Self Defense

by RatKingDad



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: MMA Kitty because yes, Minor mentions of blood and fighting, descriptions of beheading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23250730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RatKingDad/pseuds/RatKingDad
Summary: Kitty needs to feel strong, and she finds that fighting is the best way to do that. The other queens might disagree.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 83





	1. Chapter 1

It wasn’t like they didn’t expect this to happen eventually. They’d been sneaking around for a few months, or well, Kitty had been sneaking and Anna had been lying by omission. When Anna decided she wanted to take up MMA as a hobby, no one had an objection. She was physically strong, hearty, and she could take a hit. The queens didn’t want Anna to get hurt, of course, but they knew she could handle herself. Anna gave as good as she got in a fight. 

Kitty was another matter entirely. It was difficult for her to stand up for herself and, to her frustration, the other queens felt an inherent need to protect her. She didn’t want that, didn’t want to be coddled and wrapped up in bubble wrap and treated like she was some innocent fragile thing. In her past life, she had broken and bent and still persisted. It was almost offensive to her that her strength was underestimated the way it was. If she didn’t know it was out of love, Kitty was sure she would be furious at every time another queen shouted over her in an effort to defend her, sure that Kitty couldn’t do it herself. 

That was why Kitty found herself at Anna’s door one day when she was about to go train. She knocked, having to force herself to not do it as timidly as she normally would have. If Kitty wanted to prove to Anna that she could handle herself, she needed to at least act confident. Her chest puffed out, shoulder back, arms down at her sides, Kitty asked Anna if she could join her. 

Anna said no. 

She said no the first four times Kitty asked. But, Kitty wasn’t giving up that easily. She needed this, needed the feeling of knowing that she could protect herself. And that’s how she phrased it a fifth time, with all the desperation that burned in her soul. And Anna relented. 

That had been months ago and the two trained together as often as the possibly could. Kitty still couldn’t beat Anna in a fight, but she got in enough hits to feel the rush in her veins of personal victory. With reluctant approval from Anna, Kitty started participating in the amateur fights that the gym they went to had. 

Right foot back, left foot forward. Pivot, right, duck, push. Sweat dripping down her back and onto the padded mat below her. Clenching her fists and feeling the tightly wrapped gloves on her hands that kept her knuckles from splitting. A punch at her sternum, her kick to her opponent’s leg. Her back hitting the floor swiftly and her scrambling up just as fast. It was adrenaline to the nth degree and Kitty drank it in like it was her lifeblood. Blood, in fact, was actually dripping down from her opponent’s face from where she had gotten a solid hit on her nose. A surrender came and Kitty found her arm being lifted up by the ref, a sign that she was the winner of her final fight of the night. 

She shook her foe’s hand and hopped out of the ring, grabbing her water bottle and chugging it. Anna approached her with a big smile and wrapped her into a hug. Kitty giggled a bit and gratefully melted into the embrace.

“That was amazing Mein Schatz! You’re so fast in there, I could barely keep up!” Anna exclaimed. Kitty blushed at the praise, though it was indistinguishable that the red that painted her face from exertion. She rested her forehead against Anna’s, headbutting her lightly, and took a second to catch her breath. It was then that she noticed the massive pain that was blooming up her side. 

“Shit!” she winced back. Kitty lifted up her shirt to get a better look and cringed at the massive bruise that was blooming up her side. It, of course, wasn’t the first time she had gotten banged up while fighting, but most of the time it could be covered by her costume or obscured by fishnets and sheer sleeves. Kitty made a concerted effort to avoid taking hits on the parts of her chest that would be exposed or ones on her face that couldn’t easily be covered by makeup. This bruise ran down her whole torso, from the bottom of her ribs to her hip, and sent throbbing hurt through her body. She wasn’t going to be able to go on, both from the pain of it that she knew would take a coupled days to heal, getting worse before it got better, and from the fact that the strip of midriff her costume showed would definitely show off the bruise.

Anna looked at the bruise wide-eyed for a second in shock. Then, she bent over double in amusement. 

“Oh my god! Jane is gonna kill me!” she said through laughter. “Let’s get you home and ice that. We’ll say our goodbyes before I get murdered!” 

Kitty chuckled nervously. She tried to take a step but winced when her foot coming down stretched her sternum. Anna stopped laughing and stared at her with concern. 

“What do you need me to do Mein Schatz?” she asked gently. Kitty sighed, wrapping an arm around herself. 

“Carry me to the car?” 

Needless to say, it was extremely suspicious when the two of them showed up at home with Kitty held in Anna’s arms, still covered in sweat and wearing the clothes she had been fighting in that were dotted with blood. 

Jane shrieked a bit and ran over to them, already fussing.

“Are you hurt? What happened? Are you bleeding? Why is there blood, Anna? Why are you holding your side?” she didn’t even stop for breath. Anna and Kitty gave each other a long look before Anna set her gently down on to the floor, though Kitty continued to keep an arm around her waist for support. Slowly, Kitty lifted up the side of her shirt to show off the massive bruise, noting that it looked much worse than it had half an hour ago. 

Jane gasped loudly, tears springing to her eyes. Kitty felt guilt well up in her, cold and heavy, as she saw how worried the woman was. 

“Do we need to call the police?” Jane practically screeched. By now the others had all gathered around them too and Kitty felt suffocated. She pressed herself into Anna before answering.

“No, no! I just-” she looked to Anna for support and the softly reassuring smile she got in return propelled her forward, “I’ve been doing MMA with Anna these past few months. This is from a fight tonight. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten hurt, but its the first time it was this bad,” 

A cacophony of voices flooded her ears and she almost lost her grip on Anna as she rushed to block them out.

“You’ve gotten hurt before!?”

“Anna, you let her fight?!?”

“Months!?”

“I swear to god, Anna if you enabled Kitty in this I will kill you!”

“Stop!” Anna shouted. The room went silent, rare as it was to hear Anna raise her voice. Kitty whimpered from her place pressed into Anna’s side. “Kitty is an adult, okay? If she wants to fight in a controlled space with people who aren’t trying to seriously hurt each other, then that’s her choice. And it’s my choice to support her in any way she needs me to. This sort of freak out is exactly why we didn’t say anything. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’m going to go help her ice this and you all can squabble like bloody geese” 

With that, Anna swooped Kitty back into her arms and carried her up the stairs and into her bedroom. She helped prop Kitty up on her pillows and left to grab painkillers and ice. While she was gone, Kitty stared up at the ceiling. She wondered if Jane would ever let her fight again, if she would ever feel that thrill of knowing that she wasn’t helpless. 

When the door opened again, she expected to see Anna, but instead, Jane crept in with an ice pack and sat down on the bed next to her. She started to speak and then stopped, sighing heavily. They sat together in silence, Kitty shifting to find a position where the ice pack laid comfortably on her torso.

“Oh, Kitten, what am I going to do with you?” Jane asked, shaking her head in amusement. Kitty shrugged, curling up the corners of her mouth. 

“Guess you’ll just have to love me,” she joked. Jane moved to lay down next to her and placed a kiss on the top of her head. 

“I’m always going to worry about you. I worry about all of us, but you most of all. I never want you to get hurt again, Kitten. All I want is for you to be happy and healthy,” 

“I am happy when I’m fighting. And Anna does a great job keeping me safe,” Kitty assured. 

“And you’re keeping yourself safe too right?” 

“Of course,”

Jane let out a deep breath and wrapped Kitty up into a hug that the younger queen would have leaned into if not for the shooting ache on her stomach.

“Then it makes me happy too,” Jane relented.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This ended up being more Anne angst than anything oops

Anne absolutely refused to go watch her cousin fight. It had been a few months since the reveal that Kitty had been doing MMA in her spare time and Kitty had started participating in more and more of the amateur fights that the gym she went to put on. Often the girl came how with bruises and sore muscles, blood on her hands or face. All the other queens had been going to watch and while they all expressed their concerns, it’s not like they could stop her. Aragon had even started to train a bit too, though she said that she didn’t think she could ever actually do a fight. Apparently, it was a wonderful stress relief. But for Anne, the nights when her cousin came home beaten and battered were anything but stress relief. Tonight was one of those nights. 

Kitty slipped in the door, bag slung over her shoulder and Anna and Aragon at her back. The older queens looked unharmed, after all, they only trained and never fought. But Kitty was another story and the sight of her made every nerve in Anne’s body rage.

Seeing the scar around Kitty’s throat was always nauseating for her. Thie thing was much thicker than her own. It was thick and mangled, like a gnarled bark, wide and only barely covered by the choker she wore during the show. Kitty often complained of how much the tissue would ache and itch when it was humid or when she was sweaty. Most terrifying for Anne though, was how the skin around it would tug and pull. Kitty stood in the entranceway, laughing along to a joke Anna was telling as Anne watched her in utter horror, stopped dead in her tracks by the sight before her. 

Beads of blood welled up around the edges of the scar, evidence of the strain put on the skin when Kitty moved during her fights. It wasn’t even a large amount of blood, objectively it was nothing. The world was utterly frozen as Anne’s eyes fixed with laser focus onto the little drops. All it took was one, one little minuscule tear that fell down from the edge, streaming delicately into the hollow of Kitty’s throat and staying there as it did not have the weight to fall any further. Amongst the bruising and contusions that peppered her skin, that red line ringing around her neck was the final straw. Something in Anne broke when she saw it drop.

Faster than she could think about the consequences, Anne rushed forward and got into Kitty’s face. Her hand found purchase on the girl’s upper arm and all her worry and rage channeled itself into her grasp, all rational cognition drowned in the swarthy bile of panic.

“Are you stupid?” She yelled, teeth-gnashing and spittle leaving her lips. Kitty reeled back in shock, ironically looking like she had been struck despite the fact that she had likely been hit several times tonight, “Seriously, how do you keep doing this so often? Letting yourself get hurt and thrown around like a fucking ragdoll!”

Kitty’s face twisted in deep offense, “I can hold my own!”

“Apparently you fucking can’t! If you could then you’d be able to stop yourself from getting fucked up every two seconds. It’s naive, and it’s self-destructive, and honestly, I think you like getting hurt! How could you keep doing it if you didn’t?”Anne shouted. She hated herself the second the words left her mouth

“I’m not a child Anne! This makes me feel strong! Yeah sure, I get hurt, but I always get back up. I always have. For some reason, you don’t seem to be able to see that!” Kitty shouted. It was rare for her to raise her voice like this, even as she honed her body into a weapon she tended to stumble over her words. In a way, Anne appreciated the shouting. Subtle signs and passive aggression were never things she could understand.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt!”

“I won’t!”

“I can’t lose you, Kitty! You’re all I have! Please, please, I can’t-” Anne’s pleas were cut off by a choking sob, “Please-”

She didn’t realize that she had stopped talking, stopped breathing, until a long-fingered hand placed itself on her cheek. Kitty watched her with a mixture of concern and frustration, face horribly confused. Ripping away, Anne ran towards her bedroom, trying not to stumble on the stairs. 

It wasn’t until she reached her door that air let itself back in. She slumped against the wall, head falling down into her hands. When the sobs started, Anne didn’t know, but her throat felt torn apart by them.

For Kitty, fighting was power, she knew this. But she forgot it the second she saw that red ring that made its way around her cousin’s neck. Her breath picked up once again as she imagined the scar splitting further, imagined how Kitty must have looked when her head rolled off of the block. The blood that must have stained the scaffold, that must have soaked its way into Kitty’s dress. When one is beheaded, there are a few seconds where the person stays conscious. Anne knew what it was like. She hadn’t been able to think clearly but she remembered seeing the crowd. She remembered the overwhelming red of her own blood. It was only a moment, but it had been her last before she fell into nothing. There wasn’t any pain, her severed spinal cord made sure of that. Anne knew the same thing must have happened to Kitty. She knew but she hoped not, hoped that maybe Kitty had passed out from pain the second the ax touched the nape of her neck and had no memories of screaming crowds and crimson tides of life spewing from where she had once been connected to her body. 

Kitty’s screams in the night and how she nearly keeled over the first time she had gotten a paper cut said otherwise. It seemed that fighting must have desensitized her to it, but Anne wasn’t quite so lucky. 

Anne knew that Kitty only fought other women. She knew that everyone who stepped in the ring with her would be around the same weight and build. But that wasn’t how she imagined it. Instead, when she thought of Kitty fighting, all Anne could think of the large looming shadows of men pinning Kitty down to the floor, hitting her relentlessly as Kitty flailed in helpless fear. It wasn’t true, Kitty won more fights than she lost. It wasn’t true, it wasn’t true, it wasn’t true, but oh god it was all Anne could think of.

The next thing Anne knew, Kitty was kneeling before her. Damn, that girl was fast. Anne frantically tried to wipe her tears, to hide the evidence that she had broken down at all, but her efforts were fruitless. 

“Annie, are you okay?” Kitty gently inquired. Anne shook her head fervently. 

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” she breathlessly gasped out. Kitty grasped her hands. 

“Come watch me fight,”

“What?”

“Come watch me, you’ll see. I can hold my own,” Kitty insisted. Hesitantly, Anne leaned forward to hold her cousin close. 

“Okay. Okay, I will,” she agreed, shakily. 

“You know you’re my favorite person right? I love you.”

“I know, I love you too,”


	3. Chapter Three

Anne’s mouth was completely dry, and for once it wasn’t because she was surrounded by sweating men and women, many of whom were shirtless. No, instead it was because tonight was an ammetuar fight night at the MMA gym and her cousin, her sweet little baby cousin, was one of the fighters on the docket. But she had promised that she would come, just to see that Kitty could actually hold her own. 

Jane, by her side, was similarly affected. She was pale to the point of being faintly green, and kept muttering under her breath about how unsanitary everything was. Anne knew it wasn’t really about germs, it was about the spirit of it. Anna and Catherine may be enthusiastic, and Cathy borderline apathetic, but the two of them had been worrying themselves into spirals about having to actually see Kitty willingly getting hurt. 

The man who had just won his fight wiped away blood from under his eye and spit onto the floor. The blood churned Anne’s stomach, and Jane groaned beside her. 

“Did he have to just… spit on the floor?” She questioned incredulously. Anne stifled a laugh as Jane glared accusingly at Catalina and Anna, “Do you people just spit on the floor here?”

“Yes,”

“Never!”

It was easy enough to guess who said what. Anne debated whether or not to put a hand on Jane’s back. It was so sweaty in here, it might make her feel worse. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a package of mint gum.

“Here,” Anne passed a stick to Jane, taking one for herself, “It’ll help with your stomach,”

“Who knew Anne Boleyn would turn out to be such a worry wart?” Anna teased, to a resounding glare.

“Shut it, I’m not a worry wart. There’s just…” her breathing hitched for a second as her stomach gave another lurch. Kitty was next up, and she was laughing with the guy who still had crimson dripping sluggishly from the split open cut on his brow. “There’s a lot of blood,” 

Jane gripped her hand and Anna’s mocking smirk turned sympathetic. 

“I’m sure Kitty won’t mind if you have to go,” she suggested. Anne shook her head furiously.

“No, no I promised I would be here to watch and I’m going to be here to watch,” Before anyone could respond to that, one of the instructions at the gym shouted out to the small assembled crowd on the old bleachers that the next round was starting up. With a mounting dread, Anne watched Kitty step into the ring and get into a starting position, shaking her opponents hand. It was a man against her, apparently because it wasn’t really an “official” match they didn’t need to follow all the rules about gender separation. They two were relatively the same size, and Anne could see how it might be a fair fight, but she still felt cold and fearful.

That feeling only grew when the first punch was thrown. They really were pretty even for a while, truly. Anne had never seen her cousin move in such an outwardly aggressive way and it was a bit jarring to compare her somewhat frantic movements in the fight to her normally peppy and energetic self. Most of it was just circling around each other, occasionally jerking out in a punch or kick that only hit half the time. She forgot about her worry for a second and just started softly rooting for Kitty under her breath.

“Come on, come on kitten, you can do this,” 

And then Kitty was swept onto the ground and the guy had her shoved into the corner of the ring. For a solid minute Anne watched in frozen terror as Kitty struggled against him, fighting to break out and landing hits on his back. She broke out eventually, grinning through her mouth guard, but Anne couldn’t do it anymore. All she could see was her cousin's nightmares (which had decreased significantly in the past few months, since she had taken up MMA) where she cried out about men holding her down, hurting her. Here, she signed up for it, but Anne still felt rising bile. 

That round, and the next, were announced in the man’s favor. Kitty lost with a smile though, high giving and congratulating her opponent. Anne took the opportunity to run out of the stands and into the bathroom. She locked herself in a stall, breath fast and short. 

Kitty would be fine. Kitty loved this. But Anne knew she should never, ever, go to one of these things again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No happy ending for Anne :(


End file.
